1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and system for multiple computer or process coordinating. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and system for network management.
2. Description of Related Art
Technology expenditures have become a significant portion of operating costs for most enterprises, and businesses are constantly seeking ways to reduce information technology (IT) costs. This has given rise to an increasing number of outsourcing service providers, each promising, often contractually, to deliver reliable service while offloading the costly burdens of staffing, procuring, and maintaining an IT organization. While most service providers started as network pipe providers, they are moving into server outsourcing, application hosting, and desktop management. For those enterprises that do not outsource, they are demanding more accountability from their IT organizations as well as demanding that IT is integrated into their business goals. In both cases, “service level agreements” have been employed to contractually guarantee service delivery between an IT organization and its customers. As a result, IT teams now require management solutions that focus on and support “business processes” and “service delivery” rather than just disk space monitoring and network pings.
IT solutions now require end-to-end management that includes network connectivity, server maintenance, and application management in order to succeed. The focus of IT organizations has turned to ensuring overall service delivery and not just the “towers” of network, server, desktop, and application. Management systems must fulfill two broad goals: a flexible approach that allows rapid deployment and configuration of new services for the customer; and an ability to support rapid delivery of the management tools themselves. A successful management solution fits into a heterogeneous environment, provides openness with which it can knit together management tools and other types of applications, and a consistent approach to managing all of the IT assets.
With all of these requirements, a successful management approach will also require attention to the needs of the staff within the IT organization to accomplish these goals: the ability of an IT team to deploy an appropriate set of management tasks to match the delegated responsibilities of the IT staff; the ability of an IT team to navigate the relationships and effects of all of their technology assets, including networks, middleware, and applications; the ability of an IT team to define their roles and responsibilities consistently and securely across the various management tasks; the ability of an IT team to define groups of customers and their services consistently across the various management tasks; and the ability of an IT team to address, partition, and reach consistently the managed devices.
Many service providers have stated the need to be able to scale their capabilities to manage millions of devices. When one considers the number of customers in a home consumer network as well as pervasive devices, such as smart mobile phones, these numbers are quickly realized. Significant bottlenecks appear when typical IT solutions attempt to support more than several thousand devices.
Given such network spaces, a management system must be very resistant to failure so that service attributes, such as response time, uptime, and throughput, are delivered in accordance with guarantees in a service level agreement. In addition, a service provider may attempt to support many customers within a single network management system. The service provider's profit margins may materialize from the ability to bill usage of a common management system to multiple customers.
On the other hand, the service provider must be able to support contractual agreements on an individual basis. Service attributes, such as response time, uptime, and throughput, must be determinable for each customer. In order to do so, a network management system must provide a suite of network management tools that is able to perform device monitoring and discovery for each customer's network while integrating these abilities across a shared network backbone to gather the network management information into the service provider's distributed data processing system. There is a direct relationship between the ability of a management system to provide network monitoring and discovery functionality and the ability of a service provider using the management system to serve multiple customers using a single management system. Preferably, the management system can replicate services, detect faults within a service, restart services, and reassign work to a replicated service. By implementing a common set of interfaces across all of their services, each service developer gains the benefits of system robustness. A well-designed, component-oriented, highly distributed system can easily accept a variety of services on a common infrastructure with built-in fault-tolerance and levels of service.
Distributed data processing systems with thousands of nodes are known in the prior art. The nodes can be geographically dispersed, and the overall computing environment can be managed in a distributed manner. The managed environment can be logically separated into a series of loosely connected managed regions, each with its management server for managing local resources. The management servers coordinate activities across the enterprise and permit remote site management and operation. Local resources within one region can be exported for the use of other regions in a variety of manners.
As with most organizations, an IT organization, such as a service provider, may classify its personnel into different managerial roles. Given a scenario in which a service provider is using an integrated network management system for multiple customers, it is most likely that many different individuals will be assigned to manage different customers, different regions, and different groups of devices. In addition, separate individuals may have different duties within similar portions of the network, such as deploying new devices versus monitoring the uptime of those devices, and the management system should be able to differentiate the roles of the individuals and to restrict the actions of any particular individual to those operations that are appropriate for the individual's role. In a highly distributed system comprising on the order of a million devices, the task of authenticating and authorizing the actions of many individuals per customer, per region, per device, etc., becomes quite complex.
In this type of environment, it would be valuable for an administrative user to be able to view management-related information through a variety of graphical user interfaces. Typically, a network management application displays information associated with the physical configurations of a set of networks, such as information pertaining to the status and type of devices or communication links within the distributed system; various types of icons or color-coding might be used to graphically differentiate the information so that an administrative user can view portions of networks in an easy-to-understand, graphical manner. However, for large distributed systems of more than a million devices, typical application displays would be filled with similar icons for most subnetworks, which would be rather monotonous for an administrative user, and most displays would also appear to be redundant. Even though a user might be able to display device identifiers concurrently with graphical icons in order to distinguish different devices and systems, the identifiers may also be similar to each other. In a highly distributed system with many customers and administrators using a common network management framework, graphical variations with respect to network-related information would be inadequate.
Moreover, it would be very valuable in a highly distributed environment for an administrative user to be able to request various presentation formats for the system's topology information within a graphical user interface. Typically, a network management application allows an administrative user to zoom a user perspective with respect to a graphical layout of a set of networks; as the user zooms in or out, more or less detail within the networks is displayed. In a highly distributed system with many customers and administrators using a common network management framework, varying the topology presentation format only with respect to levels of detail would be inadequate.
Therefore, it would be particularly advantageous to provide a method and system within a network management framework for displaying multi-customer information in a variety of presentation formats. It would be particularly advantageous for the network management system to provide an ability to view non-network-related information in conjunction with the presentation of the topology of a network.